Studies on stress testing the financial system has been growing substantially recently due to the importance of these exercises, highlighted by the subprime financial crisis, the bank failures sequence in many countries and the Brazilian economic crisis. This paper proposes a stress test methodology, focused on credit risk, for the Brazilian financial system. After the scope definition, the second step of a stress test is the vulnerabilities of the financial system identification, in which the relation between macroeconomic factors and credit risk are captured. Most papers use a limited set of macroeconomic factors. This paper proposes the use of more than 300 variables and a factor analysis to obtain macroeconomic factors to consider a more comprehensive set of variables in an ARIMAX model. In addition, academic papers commonly employ panel data models, VAR, time series or linear regression models. However, changing one variable rarely affects another instantaneously because the effect is distributed over time. In this work the polynomial distributed lag model is proposed, which considers this effect when estimating the lagged parameters by a second degree polynomial. The models were constructed using March 2007 to August 2016 as a modeling period and September 2016 to August 2017 as an out of time validation period. For the validation period, the proposed models presented a smaller sum of the squares errors. The third step is the calibration of an adverse and plausible stress scenario, which can be obtained by historical, hypothetical and probabilistic methods. We note a gap in the Brazilian literature, provided in this paper, in which there are no hypothetical and historical scenarios (which consider all crises of 2002, subprime crisis of 2008 and crisis of 2015/2017) for Brazil. It was noted that historical shocks generate more severe values than hypothetical shocks, and there are variables more sensitive to different types of economic crises. When verifying the impact of the scenario obtained for the institutions, the estimated default in the stress scenario was 6.38%, an increase of 68% in relation to the base scenario. This increase was similar, somewhat more severe, to the shocks obtained in the Brazilian literature and to the Financial Stability Report built by the Central Bank of Brazil, which estimates that the banking system is prepared to absorb a macroeconomic stress scenario.

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